It is no secret that a large number of people, from your network operator to the likes of Google, all intend to make money from advertising on your mobile.

The potential rewards, they think, are significant.

The fact is, how you use your mobile can say so much about you, advertising can be targeted at you with considerable precision. As a result, advertisers can be persuaded to pay noticeably higher rates.

There’s an article by Bob Walczak, the CEO of Ringleader Digital, on the Mobile Marketing Association website that’s worth reading. It helps to explain the enthusiasm of prospective practitioners.

“Given their anywhere portability and anytime accessibility, mobile devices are a much more personal media channel,” Walczak writes. “After all, it’s a phone, a PDA that enables applications like email, instant and text messaging and internet surfing, but it is also a multimedia device.

“Now,” he continues, “add the combination of cellular, WI-FI, and Bluetooth technologies, and you have very personal databases that can be opened up to many more touch points.”

In other words, by exhaustively monitoring your activities and tracking your location, often without your knowledge, a lot can be learnt about you.

Rightly Walczak points out: “Given the ultimate advertising potential of all this, we’ve only scratched the surface on the privacy issues.”

And that is because, as Walczak explains, “for advertising to be effective, the advertiser must have access to some basic information about the consumer and his or her interests.”

In other words your network operator, or Google, or whoever has been capturing information about you, is going to pass some or all of that information on to the advertiser.

Walczak thinks this is justified “because untargeted advertising has very little relevance to the consumer’s interest or needs. However, providing relevant advertising should be less intrusive to the consumer and ultimately improve the overall user experience.”

So let’s envisage how this might work in practice.

You spend a lot of time on adventure sports websites. You have previously booked adventure sports holidays and now you have just used your mobile to book another. You go to a comparison site to buy some travel insurance.

Elsewhere your more cultural twin brother, who spends much of his time online reading art criticism and visiting gallery websites, and who invariably goes on holiday to cities like Florence and Venice, has also arrived at the same comparison website.

Even though you are both going to the same European country for the same length of time, the only insurance quotes you can obtain are consistently higher than his. Why the disparity, you might wonder?

The explanation could be behavioural targeting. Information about you will have been passed on to the comparison website, who in turn have passed it on to the insurance companies, who in turn have adjusted their quotes accordingly.

Quite how this has improved your overall user experience is not immediately clear.

Nor is it only conspiracy theorists who worry that your personal information might be put to even more sinister use.

In the United States no fewer than 10 major privacy groups, including the Consumers Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Consumer Federation of America, the Center for Digital Democracy and the national Public Interest Research Group intend to demand new privacy legislation from Congress to regulate online behavioural tracking and advertising targeting.

According to the New York Times “they ask that no sensitive information (like health or financial information) be used for behavioral tracking; no one under 18 be behaviorally tracked; Web sites and ad networks be forbidden to keep behavioral data for more than a day without getting permission from the individual they’re tracking; and behavioral data be disallowed for discriminatory purposes.”

In the United Kingdom this autumn The Office of Fair Trading is to examine such online practices as behavioural targeting and using personal data to target specific users with varying prices.

But even if decisions are taken to put privacy before profitability, and that is by no means certain, you might still not be protected.

What, for example, is to stop traffic being routed via countries where personal privacy is considered inconsequential?

Similarly, what happens if you fail to thoroughly read all 96 pages of small print before you sign your contract with your network operator? You may find you have given your consent without realising it.

Be warned. Profit has invariably proven the mother of invention. And if there is money to be made, somebody usually finds a way of doing it.